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Is FRONT-END DEVELOPMENT A Good Career_
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Feb 6, 2024
"Is FRONT-END DEVELOPMENT A Good Career?" is an informative and insightful video that explores the potential of front-end development as a career choice. The video likely discusses various aspects of front-end development, such as job demand, salary prospects, career growth opportunities, and the evolving nature of the field. It may also touch upon the skills and technologies required for success in front-end development, as well as the challenges and rewards associated with the profession. By providing a balanced overview of the front-end development industry, the video aims to help viewers make informed decisions about pursuing a career in this field and understand the potential benefits and considerations involved.
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I still can't believe you said this to my face
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So is front end development a good career? What's up and welcome back? My name is James and I am a self-taught software engineer
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In this video, I'm going to share with you why I think working on the front end is a great
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career decision and this is based on years of experience as a software engineer
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Perhaps one of the biggest reasons why becoming a front end software engineer is a great decision
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is because there is a lot of demand for the front end
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All right, so what does the front end developer do? Basically, whenever you have like a web application or any kind of application
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there's going to be the layer of the application that deals with like the data and storing data and retrieving data
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And then there's going to be the portion of the application that a user interacts with
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the interface of the application. That's what most people are used to when they see an application
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They are interacting with like the web page or they're on the app and clicking buttons and doing things like that
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That layer is the front end and it makes calls or has a way to communicate with the back end
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to fetch the data that it needs or to send off data to be saved. It displays it to the user
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Now, one of the biggest reasons why I think that becoming a front end software engineer is a good idea
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is because there is a lot of demand and a growing demand for it
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You think about how many companies are out there that either need a website or applications or custom tools
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And the need is only getting bigger and bigger because, All these companies are collecting large amounts of data
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They need something to do with the data. They need ways to interact with the data. They are getting new insights and figuring out how to incorporate AI stuff into their marketing or their workflows
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There's going to be so many opportunities as technology grows. The demand has just been really, really solid
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And if you're looking to get a start in software, it's a great way to get your foot in the door with minimal experience
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When compared to some of the other fields in software that if you don't have a lot of solid
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experience, the competition can be really, really tough. And one of the things that I really like about the front end is I feel like it's a
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really good blend of logic and creativity. There's still the opportunity to build things, do the business logic with JavaScript
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and to, you know, do all sorts of, you know, computations and things like that on the front
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end. Yet I can also like leverage the fact that I am a person that likes creativity
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I like visual things and like to build things and stuff like that. So I get a lot of satisfaction from being able to like work through love
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the logic, but then also having something, you know, visual to like, you know, show for my
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efforts and to see come to, like, fruition. Now, some of the skills required to become a front end
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engineer are quite broad. It's not just all grounded in computer science. There's a lot of things
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that go into it Like you do have design and you have accessibility and you have a whole bunch of other different dynamics Another reason that I think front end is a great option is because it has a really good learning path for someone who is getting started The tooling to get started doesn require
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a lot of setup or a lot of complexity in setting up the environment
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You can quickly create an environment to start learning some of the basics
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like HTML and CSS and then JavaScript. And as your experience grows
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you can incorporate more tooling and more tooling and build up into the complexity
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Whereas, you know, some of the other fields, or like if you're going to be doing work on the back end
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now you're dealing with, like, setting up the back end and also databases and all this stuff
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a lot of setup just to get things to where you can start actually working with the language
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It's just so much easier, you know, getting started on the front end. I also think it's a really good place to be if you don't have a computer science degree
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because it seems like the landscape on the front end is a lot more open to a mixture of, you know
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people with CS degrees and those who don't have CS degrees. And again, because of the visual nature of the front end
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you do have a lot of people who come in from like other creative, artistic fields or different areas
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And it's kind of like a blending of, you know, computer science and non-computer science themes
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So it's easy to fill at home, even if you don't have a computer science degree
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Where sometimes you get into other certain fields and stuff on the back end or into like machine learning and data science and stuff like that
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And if you don't have a computer science degree, you might be more of like an oddball
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you know, one of the few that doesn't have it. It doesn't mean you can't be successful, but, you know, there's definitely a lot more
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like, distribution on the front end. Another cool aspect of working on the front end is that it is easy to get a lot of visibility
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for your work. If you were to work on the back end and you're doing APIs and you're exposing data
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I mean, let's be honest, like, just seeing, you know, data on a screen isn't, like
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super exciting for a lot of people, especially for the business. they just see it as a data, you know, like they could look at a spreadsheet and stuff
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Nothing super exciting. But when you're actually building things on the front end and building applications and everything
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and people are able to watch and see as the application grows and new features are added
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and new interactions and cool interactions and things like that, the front end does tend to get
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a lot of the wow factor of the entire application. It's all one system that all has to work together and everyone is working hard and
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everyone is valuable who are building that application. but it's really easy to actually show what you have accomplished when you're working on the front end
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And because it's easier to show what you're accomplishing on the front end, it's also easier to market your skills as a front end engineer
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If you're working on the back end, you're going to have to really prove yourself and your skills
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by really deep diving into the data and discussions and even like whiteboarding
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to make sure that you have a solid foundation of these concepts and everything
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Whereas if you work on the front end, you could build out a portfolio of things that are very
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visual that show improve what you capable of working on and it just so much easier to sell to people especially if they like business owners and you know non people that are looking at your portfolio
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They see it and they're like, this looks good. It either looks good or it doesn't look good, right
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And that's one of the things that are looking for. They want someone who can make something that looks good. Then, I mean, you do still have to, you know
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look into whether this candidate has, you know, skills on, you know, writing good code and stuff to, you know
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be performant. And that's important in everything. but you can definitely get your foot in the door with having something visual that pops
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which is easier to do if you work on the front end. Then there's all the technology changes
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It seems like technology on the front end is like a fire hose that is constantly like spraying out new and innovative tools and things to learn
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So if you're really interested in learning and you love to learn, it's a great place to be if you want to just have that constant opportunity to learn new technologies
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try new things and to keep things fresh. If you get real bored, real easy. I'm the type of person that I can get bored fairly easy
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Once I start feeling like I'm really good at something and stuff and want to learn something new
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And so for my personality type, the front end has been really good because there's always something to learn
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It feels like there's more stuff coming out than I'm able to keep up with. So I can have a career where I'm not feeling stifled
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by being stuck in just the same technology for too long. There's always something else on the horizon and everything
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And companies are constantly updating the front end you know, regularly and stuff
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And so there's always opportunities to even change up like the application you're working on, like what it's doing and stuff like that
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There's just lots of opportunities. Not having to worry as much about security is also a good thing about the front end
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Now, there are definitely security concerns. So don't get me wrong in what I'm saying here
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Really, when you're building an application, you should always consider that the front end is compromised
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because there are different ways that a user can interact with the browser
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And so a lot of the most critical protections of the entire application
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are actually at the server and the API level, basically shielding from any kinds of threats
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that are trying to manipulate things through the APIs and everything because it's the gatekeeper to the data
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where people could get in and either access data or corrupt data and stuff like that
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And so most of the heavy concerns around security are going to need to be enforced at the API level
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There's still practices you need to follow to prevent and minimize the ability
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for people to carry out different types of attacks. in the front end, but you just aren't as likely to do something that ends up compromising the entire system
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Now, that's not always the case. I've also worked on applications that also were very much involved
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with storing data, like hybrid applications on mobile devices, where you still had to, like
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store data and then sync up the data. And during that sync, if you screwed it up on the application
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on the device there a good chance that you going to screw it up on the database as well But it is kind of nice knowing that you a little bit more removed from some of the worst security concerns another thing about working on the front end is I am incredibly impatient sometimes when I wanting to
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see things update and change if you're working on a lot of back-end languages
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they oftentimes are compiled languages and so you make a change and then you
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got to wait for a really long compilation process for the application before
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it can even run and the larger the application gets the longer it takes the longer it takes whereas on the front end dealing with things tools where you have like hot loading
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and stuff like that where you can make a change and really quickly the change is visible on the
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screen and you get that visual feedback of what you've done and everything and you don't have to
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wait long so you can keep working changing things working you know and just go back and forth really
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quickly and seeing what you're doing now if you don't mind the compiling times more power to you
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but i get impatient and another cool thing about the front end is that with the frameworks that are out there
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now you have the opportunity to actually build things not just for the web but you can also build
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native applications using for example react you can do react for web applications and react native
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for applications for the devices and stuff and so you can build applications across a whole bunch
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of different platforms and the tooling is becoming really really powerful also i can take javascript
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that i'm using to build applications on the front end and if i wanted to i could use that and go
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you know, do stuff in node on the back end and use a, you know, single programming language
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Whereas, you know, on the back end, if you were to learn one of the other common programming
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languages like Java or Scholar or some of those and then you go to work on the front end
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JavaScript is the language of the front end. So you're going to end up having to learn two languages
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It doesn't mean you can't start with JavaScript on the back end. But in the bigger enterprise environments and stuff like that, you're going to get a lot more
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of a variety of languages on the back end. And as you move from project to project, you're also going to be more likely to have to, you know
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switch languages and be really flexible on like either, you know, moving between like Java or Skull or Python
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or a bunch of different languages just depending on the project. So you are going to have to likely learn a lot more languages
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if you are, you know, working on the back end. But not everything's going to be rosy. There are back end engineers who are going to snub front end engineers
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For example, on our last house that, you know, we purchased, the homeowner mentioned that he was a software engineer
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It's like, oh, that's cool. You know, do you prefer working on the front end? the back end or are you full stack. He's like, oh, no, I'm, I'm a back end engineer
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And I also fix all the crap that the front end engineers don't know how to do and stuff
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And he was like totally snubbing and everything. And he's like, what do you do for living
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I was just like, I'm a software engineer. I'll just leave it at that. You know, so there are some people who kind of have snobbery. And that doesn't mean that there's
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not also snobbery going the other way. But sometimes you will get that that there are people
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who are going to snub you, you know, because they think that, you know, the back end is
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better than the front end. So if you're interested in becoming a front end software engineer
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You should also check out one of these videos up here on how to become a programmer quickly and I'll see you in the next one late
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